If Ohio coach Dan Morris were a referee, he might put his arena in the penalty box for delay of game.
Morris had scheduled on-ice tryouts for anyone hoping to join the team, but leaks in Bird Arena’s cooling system mean the tryouts have to be pushed back to Monday at the earliest, leaving the Bobcats without a rink at a key juncture.
After the cooling system gets fixed, it will take about five days before the ice is ready for use. If the system is not repaired by the end of today, on-ice tryouts will not begin until Tuesday at the earliest.
“You kind of have to be flexible with these things when you’re dealing with an ice rink,” Morris said. “If a rink sits dormant for three months, it’s like an old car. When you go to start it up, it might not turn over. We’re flexible, and we’ll deal with it, and we’ll try to make plans for it.”
Instead of the on-ice scrimmages Morris uses to whittle 50 to 60 hopefuls down to his team of 25 to 28 Bobcats, he will put them through off-ice drills this week to assess their individual skills and teamwork.
“We’ll do different group dynamics,” Morris said. “We’ll put them into different situations where maybe we can test their physical ability as well as their mental abilities and their abilities to work together with other people.”
The real show will take place next week, with four sessions of scrimmage play. Morris and his coaches will evaluate each player’s skill level before cutting the group in half and finalizing the roster by Sept. 16.
“We’ll get a pretty good idea of who can play and who can’t, and we’ll cut that group down smaller to a group that we can work with in practice situations,” Morris said. “When you narrow that group down, you can really see who stands out in both a positive and negative way. Then you can make an assessment from there.”
Morris said he is looking for about eight new bodies to fill the roles vacated by last year’s senior class. He was reluctant to name names but said he was excited about some of the new prospects.
“We’ve got some good players coming in, and we do every year,” he said. “We spend a lot of time out recruiting, and our previous assistant coaches do a lot of recruiting.”
Any players who do not make the team can still try out for Ohio’s Division II squad, which played its inaugural season last year.
The tryouts also will be the initial volley in the position battle to plug the most important void Morris has to fill from last year’s team: goalie. Sophomores Bryan Danczak and Fedor Dushkin, who sat behind senior transfer Blake MacNicol last year, will challenge each other and any newcomers for this year’s top spot.
“We didn’t feel like the freshman goalies were capable of carrying the workload, so we brought in a transfer senior for a year to kind of give us a year to let the freshmen grow into it,” Morris said. “So we’re kind of hoping that they did grow into it.”
cd211209@ohiou.edu
